Stuff Christians Like (19 page)

One night while jogging, I confessed that to God. As ugly and as shallow as this sounds, I said to him, “God, I want my story to give me fame. I want fame. I want to be famous.”

In a split second, I felt like God laughed. Not AT me, but WITH me, which is something I feel like he regularly does. In my heart, I heard:

“Ha! You want fame? The creator of the universe knows your name. The Alpha and Omega knows who you are and what you care about. That’s as famous as you’re ever going to be. Whose acknowledgment of you is going to stand up next to mine?”

At that point, I started laughing too, because he was right. I’m already famous. God knew me in the womb. He knows how many hairs are on my head. He’s my absolute biggest fan and I’m famous in his eyes. So are you. He’s got a blog about you that is simply astounding. He follows you on Twitter and started a fan group dedicated to you on Facebook. He can’t stop talking about you and pouring out love on you.

Is whatever you’re doing right now in life going to make you famous? Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. As Christians, we’ve already peaked. We can stop worrying about trying to become famous Christians. That’s done.

We are all famous.

This one is fun to say, isn’t it? You feel like you’re doing something righteous just by uttering it, which is great. I’m a big fan of righteousness that involves no action, just words. For me personally, saying “all sins are equal” gives me a slightly warmer feeling inside than when I say, “hate the sin, but not the sinner,” which I don’t think is even in the Bible.

We don’t really believe that most times, though. Or rather, we only believe all sins are equal when our circle of friends is equal. It’s easy to believe that when none of your friends has done anything with bigger consequences than something you’ve done. It’s easy to believe all sins are equal when the worst sin you’ve heard confessed is that someone in your small group doesn’t love their enemies enough. But it’s a lot harder to believe that when you run into big, “gross” sins.

The idea of sin equality gets shaken when you meet a guy who cheated on his wife or stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from his company or used to work at a male strip club. It gets flipped upside down when a girl in your church admits she’s had multiple abortions. Suddenly when you bump up against those things, the safe, comfortable belief that “all sins are equal” gets bruised a little. Like being relieved that someone behind you ran the red light even worse than you did, you think inside, “At least I haven’t done
that.
Sure, I’ve made some mistakes, but I’ve never done
that.
That’s a big sin right there.”

And then you’ve got a little caste system going. You don’t measure your sins against God’s Word. You measure them against what other people are doing. You start to define holiness by a standard other than God’s. The funny thing is, that approach usually works in your favor. If you look hard enough, you can usually find someone who’s blowing it far worse than you, and knowing that you’re not like them makes it a little easier to be like you.

The problem is that all sins are equal, even if the consequences aren’t. The guy who goes to jail for his mistakes is certainly paying different consequences than the guy who downloaded some porn, but all sins are equal. And I think they’re equal because God doesn’t make the same distinctions that we do. His mind is not like ours. He’s not up in heaven playing Galaga with Gideon, saying, “Oh no, Martin had an affair. Oh wait! It was just an emotional affair, not a physical affair. Phew! That was a close one.”

I think all sins are equal because anything that distracts us from God’s purpose for our lives has the same result: we’re
missing out on God’s purpose for our lives. He’s designed us for a special, perfect thing, and when we choose anything other than that, we miss it. The specifics of why we missed it probably matter less than we think. What we missed is what matters. God’s big, crazy gift of love goes unclaimed for another hour…another day…another year. Whether you decided to ignore it because you were chasing money or girls or pie or a million other things isn’t the point. You missed the gift, and that’s what God cares about. You missed another day for him to let you know how much he loves you and how important you are.

That’s why, even if we don’t believe it sometimes, I think all sins are equal.

If God grades on a guilt system, then I want to be up front with you: my house in heaven is going to be sick. I don’t know if we’re still judging things by their proximity to “the hook,” but if we are, you should consider my heaven house to be “off.” There’s going to be waterslides, everywhere. Not just in the pool, but between rooms. You want to get a Capri Sun from the kitchen? Hop on a waterslide. You want to go watch C. S. Lewis arm wrestle Aragorn from Lord of the Rings in the Ruckus Room? Hop on a waterslide.

That last thought didn’t even make sense. What’s a fictional character doing in heaven? Am I really going to call my living room the “Ruckus Room” because that’s where the Ruckus happens and the floor is made of trampolines and the walls are made of blue cotton candy and to get in you have to open presents and watch old episodes of
Seinfeld
? Yes, that is exactly what I am going to do, especially if the amount of shame we inflict on ourselves has anything to do with how big our mansion is in heaven.

My greatest source of shame, the record I like to spin the most, is called, “The Ways Jon Lets God Down.” Have you ever heard that one? It’s got some jams on it, including:

1. Jon should know better by now but still makes the same mistakes.
   
2. Jon gets arrogant when something good happens and only comes to God when life is raining.
   
3. Jon makes God look horrible by telling everyone he’s a Christian and then wrecking things he touches.
   
4. Jon wrestles with the simplest elements of faith and will never be a good enough Christian.
   

I could go on and on; it’s an album I’m really familiar with, but lately it’s getting harder to play it. Lately, as I’ve started to explore my shame with God, I’ve started to think that maybe God sees my shame and desire to beat myself into submission with guilt differently than I do. Maybe if I asked him what he thought, he’d say:

What if you struck yourself in the head with a chain every time you felt guilty or ashamed for letting me down? What if you physically punished yourself every time you were not perfect? What if the self abuse was physical and external, instead of mental and internal? Would the scars cry for help? Would the pain you were causing yourself seem cruel and unnecessary? Would your heart break if you watched that person? This is what I see when I watch you, Jonathan.

My son, my son, who told you that the crucifixion was not over?

Saying the word
crucifixion
is one of those Christian words that kind of make you look odd. You’ll never hear a rapper at the Grammys or an athlete throwing out a verbal high five to God say, “Big shout-out to God. Thank you for the crucifixion of Christ.”

I never realized that by beating myself up, I was putting on a parade of pain before the Lord as a way to enter his presence. And I never really thought about that hurting him. Not because he’s disappointed, but because he loves me. Madly, passionately, unabashedly, he loves us.

I’m not a big fan of exaggeration, which is why I don’t casually make the following sentence:

“Chuck E. Cheese is the most terrifying place I’ve ever taken my oldest daughter.”

It wasn’t the man-sized rodent character that haunts the floor of this family fun center or the wooden balls they give toddlers to throw for skeeball, or even my fear of people who have single-letter middle names (I’ve got nothing but love for you, Samuel L. Jackson). It was the maze.

For starters, it’s attached to the ceiling. So when your three-year-old wants to play in it they have to climb a series of ladders as if they are entering the terrordome. Then, once they’re inside, they simply disappear. As a parent you pace the floor nervously, bumping into tables of people enjoying birthday cake, staring up at the ceiling trying to deduce which of the shadows in the thick, brightly colored plastic tubes is your kid. Occasionally you’ll see her press her head and hands against a window in the maze similar to how an impassioned inmate would during their phone call with a loved one.

“Is she okay? Is she mouthing, ‘Help, these tunnels are infested with eight-year-old boys’? Is she having a good time?” It’s impossible to tell and there’s no clear plan for her removal. Unless Chuck E. Cheese has some sort of vacuum system to suck kids out of the ceiling maze, you just have to hope your kid will eventually find the exit and crawl down to terra firma.

It wasn’t always this way. I remember going to Chuck E.
Cheese as a child and loving the animatronic music show and the pizza. Best of all though was perhaps the ice cream bar. As a kid, having access to my own supply of jimmies or sprinkles was mind-blowing. Usually your parents were too distracted watching everyone else at your party, so you could pile on sprinkles into your bowl of ice cream until the bowl was 90 percent sprinkles, 10 percent ice cream.

Not everyone was able to handle the pressure though. I remember when I was in the second grade watching a fifth grader fall apart at the ice cream bar. The problem he faced was that the hot dog bar was right next to it. While I was waiting in line I watched him take a big bowl of pristine white soft serve vanilla ice cream and approach the first condiment dispenser. He pressed down hard and out came a serving of mustard.

It was all over his ice cream and he looked down at it with complete and utter devastation. I felt bad for him but out of nowhere a Chuck E. Cheese employee jumped in and said, “Here, that’s okay. Here’s a new bowl of ice cream. That’s okay. Here you go; have some new ice cream.”

I’ll never forget that little boy’s face as he looked up at the employee and down at his ruined bowl of ice cream. He was so ashamed at what he had done, so embarrassed that he had put mustard on it that he paused and then told the employee, “I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s not a big deal. I’m fine.” And then he started to stir the mustard into the ice cream.

He tried as hard as he could to mix that bright yellow mustard into the bright white vanilla ice cream. Finally it all became this pale emo-yellow-colored mush. He looked back up and then returned to his table, presumably to choke down his mustard ice cream.

I don’t know about your life, but I’ve put a lot worse than mustard in my bowl of ice cream. I’ve got motor oil and D-batteries and a dead bird in there. And for most of my adult life, I thought that being a Christian just meant stirring harder. Maybe I had some different tools than people that weren’t Christians, like reading my Bible or prayer, but ultimately it was up to me to try
harder. To stir harder until I was a good enough Christian or a righteous enough Christian or a holy enough Christian.

But when I came to the end of me, when I finally saw how broken my bowl really was and realized that I could not fix me, with me, I learned a secret.

Jesus came for the sick.

Not the holy.

Not the righteous.

Not the perfect.

Not even the average.

He came for the sick.

He didn’t come to take just the good people with him on a bus, and say it was okay if the sick folks like me clung to the side or rode on the roof. He came for us, the broken, the beaten, the severely messed up. Like me. Like you.

In Mark 2:17 Jesus says, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

When I bumped into that truth, it changed the way I saw my ruined bowl of ice cream. It was no longer something I needed to stir and try to make perfect. It was no longer something I imagined Jesus and God being disgusted by. My wasted years and broken promises were no longer something I needed to hide.

My bowl was a lighthouse for a doctor that was looking for me, a neon sign that flashed, “Help, I’m over here! I need you! I need you!”

I don’t know what’s in your bowl, but I know that it’s miserable to eat mustard ice cream and stirring as hard as we can is exhausting. So let’s quit trying to be enough or make things work. Let’s stop trying so hard.

Let’s be sick. Let’s be loved.

Which makes no sense. There’s nothing else in life that works this way, where you can break something over and over and over again. And when you admit it, when you hold the pieces in your
hand, you’re met with the last thing you could ever think possible, love. That’s ridiculous, but I think that’s the gospel in four words.

Be sick. Be loved.